Why would anyone want to let their hair freeze into frosty stiffness? Maybe for a cash prize, or some internet points. You could win $2000 in the Takhini Hot Springs Hair Freezing Contest. Entries will be accepted until March 8.

To enter the contest, visit the Takhini Hot Springs any day during the winter when the temperature is below -20°C. We are located twenty minutes north of Whitehorse, Yukon. Upon arrival, purchase a regular admission to the hot springs and provide a signed photo release form to one of our staff members, letting them know that you would like to participate in the hair freezing contest. Once you have entered the hot springs and perfected your frozen hairdo, ring the wireless doorbell and wait for our staff to come take your photo. After your soak make sure to come back to the lobby to upload your photo to the contest site and share your image with your friends! For every person that enters the contest, our sponsor, Nongshim Noodles will donate 5 packs of instant noodles to the Whitehorse Food Bank!

Incidentally, -20 means four degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But since this is a hot springs, the rest of your body will be warm enough (we think). If you can't make it to the Yukon in time, you can go to the website, see those who have entered already, and vote for the People's Choice Award. Winners in other categories will be selected by the hot springs judges. If you do want to enter, the website has instructions, rules, and tips for making your hair freeze nicely. -via Everlasting Blort

Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone in 1876, and the first automated call-switching system was introduced only 16 years later in 1892. While the phone itself was adopted rapidly, automatic switching was so slow to catch on that human telephone operators handled most calls for decades afterward. Bell Telephone wanted to keep their technology easy for the user- just pick up the phone and tell the lady what you wanted. And operators were almost always women, who were found to be more polite, more proficient, and cheaper to hire than men.

An operator did more than simply connect a customer to his or her desired number, however. In the early decades of the industry, telephone companies regarded their business less as a utility and more as a personal service. The telephone operator was central to this idea, acting as an early version of an intelligent assistant with voice recognition capabilities. She got to know her 50 to 100 assigned customers by name and knew their needs. If a party didn't answer, she would try to find him or her around town. If that didn't succeed, she took a message and called the party again later to pass the message along. She made wake-up calls and gave the time, weather, and sports scores. During crimes in progress or medical emergencies, a subscriber needed only to pick up the handset and the operator would summon the police or doctors.

Unlike other modern technologies, automatic telephone switching happened first in small towns and rural areas, then spread slowly to cities. Meanwhile, millions of women made a meager living keeping us connected. Read how that happened at Econ Focus. -via Damn Interesting  

(Image credit: National Archives)

Photographer Ari Seth Cohen has presented his photos of fashionistas aging gracefully at his blog Advanced Style for more than ten years. More recently, he collected photographs and stories from older couples into the book Advanced Love. 

And just where did he find so many amazing partners? “[By] scouting the streets like I always do,” he says, “but this time around I had submissions from Facebook and Instagram as well. I was also able to finally include many of the partners of women I had already photographed.” When it came time to ask about something as personal as love, he says he was pleasantly surprised to hear so “many of the couples speak about their sex lives and the struggles they face. They were all very open and honest about the fact that long lasting relationships take a lot of work. “

Get a taste of the book with a few wonderful stories and even more pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

The word “calorie” is usually related to things such as diet and nutrition, the usual things that we think of whenever we hear of the word. But, it isn’t just a tool for the public understanding of nutrition. Historian Nick Cullather writes that for over a century, the calorie is used in the public understanding of labor relations and foreign policies as well.

For government officials, the utility of the calorie was immediately clear. It could help with efficient management of nutrition for prisons, schools, and armies. Extending Frederick Taylor’s time and motion studies, calorie counts could determine the most efficient ways of feeding an industrial workforce—an idea that workers and their unions resisted, recognizing it as a way to justify low wages.

The calorie also let scientists compare the diets of different nations. Journalists enthused about the possibilities that quantified nutrition might offer for changing the eating habits of Asians in particular. As the Review of Reviews asked, “what can we expect either of physical or moral vigor from communities who live on the physical plane of millions in the Orient?”

More about this over at JSTOR Daily.

(Image Credit: stevepb/ Pixabay)

Cuttlefish love shrimp. In fact, when given a choice whether to eat crab and shrimp multiple times in the day, they would always choose shrimp. What’s more, these cuttlefish would rather wait for their beloved food if they knew it was coming. These are the two things that the team led by the University of Cambridge, found out.

This ability to anticipate their favorite food is an indication of the cephalopod's complex brain and cognitive abilities.

[...]

… when the cuttlefish knew they were getting shrimp for dinner, they wouldn't eat many crabs during the day, but when they couldn't anticipate their preferred meal, they filled up on crab.

More details about this interesting study over at New Atlas.

(Image Credit: Jarek Tuszyński/ CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GDFL/ Wikimedia Commons)

Israeli designer Yaara Nusboim has created a set of dolls to help children with therapy through play. Alma Dolls are handcrafted by the designer herself. The dolls are a collaboration between Nusboim and child psychologists, and represent particular emotions. Plain magazine has more details: 

Their shapes, weight and textures differ according to the feeling they symbolize, helping the child interpret a range of emotions during therapy, and giving the therapist clues to the child’s mental and emotional state. “The dolls are meant to facilitate a child’s connection to his inner world, and to improve and heal his condition,” the designer says. She hopes that the Alma Dolls can be internationally marketed to reach other children in need.

image via Plain magazine

Jafar the snake is shedding his skin, which makes a melodious popping sound as the skin sloughs off. It's quite pleasant, actually.

What is truly horrifying is the entire Instagram channel of Jafar's human, @pacinthesink. Having a pet snake is kind of cool.

Having pet cobras is bizarre. And, if I understand the videos correctly, @pacinthesink allows his/her cobras to roam the house uncaged. This is something that I would not do, but I am, I suppose, a timid soul.

-via Twisted Sifter

A new world record for a single firework was set Saturday in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

At 7:56 p.m., fireworks expert Tim Borden successfully captured the world record for the largest single firework when the 2,797-pound behemoth illuminated the crowd during the Night Extravaganza at the annual Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival.

The 62-inch shell was launched from a 26-foot long mortar from atop Howelsen Hill, reaching nearly a mile in the air when it detonated, putting on quite the show!

This was Borden's second attempt at the world record, but the shell he constructed a year ago exploded inside the mortar. That's a video we would also like to see. -via Gizmodo

Update: I got my wish. Here is the video of the failed attempt, but it is from quite a distance. -Thanks, smittypap!

When you see that a movie is "based on a true story," that could mean it's an attempt at a faithful retelling with some dramatic license, or it could mean the true story was a one-sentence concept that the writers took off from. Unless you do some research, you won't know how close the movie comes to the original. Dr. Stephanie Starling did that research for quite a few recent movies. The movies above are graphed scene by scene, with blue indicating true, red indicating false, and the lighter colors used for varying levels of accuracy. As you can see, Selma was a theatrical recreation of what could have been a documentary, while The Imitation Game was almost all fictionalized. At Information is Beautiful, 18 movies are presented in interactive graphs, in which you can click on a scene and see a comparison of the movie scene to the real event. You can also vary the pedantry of the graphs, from "flexible" to "nothing but the truth." I just went through the graph for Bohemian Rhapsody and now feel like I've seen the movie. -via Digg

A hard-working sheepdog finds an ingenious way to stop a drought. That's a good dog. This short film by Omeleto alternates between funny, sad, tense, and joyful. Meanwhile, we find out where clouds come from.

February 4, 1993. A few hours just before dawn, a pale silvery light about as bright as the full moon, 5km in diameter, was seen across Europe, “starting at southern France through Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and finally [disappearing] in the early sunlight in Byelorussia.” Unfortunately, it was cloudy that day, so there were not that many ground witnesses. Nevertheless, there were some who reported seeing a momentary flash of that light.

The spotlight came from a large reflector that was launched into orbit by the Russian Federal Space Agency, some three months earlier from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Called Znamya, which means “banner” or “flag” in Russian, the satellite was an experiment to study the feasibility of using space mirrors to illuminate the nightside of the planet using the sun’s rays, pretty much the same “way a schoolchild playing with a hand mirror learns to reflect a spot of light from a bright window into the crannies of his room,” as The New York Times explained in a 1993 article.

Learn more about the Znamya space mirror over at the Amusing Planet.

(Image Credit: Amusing Planet)

Regarding our "people will make a competition out of anything" category, you are invited to enter the second annual Competitive Winter Picnicking event from Shadow Traffic. This year's picnic will be on March first at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. While we don't know if that date will be "wintery" with snow and ice, it is expected to at least be muddy. Which will only make it more fun for extreme competition-type people.

Our judges will be scoring the categories of Richest Picnic Meal, Tastiest Picnic Drink, Funnest Picnic Game and Tightest Thematic Team. That last one will be judged on costumes, props, puns/references and overall synergy. Cash prizes will be awarded. Judges are bribeable.

-via Boing Boing

At the Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier in the south Netherlands, the winds are always blowing. It's a good place to stage a bicycle race that is centered around those difficult headwinds, namely the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships (Nederlands Kampioenschap Tegenwindfietsen). When Tom Scott heard there was a storm coming in just as the cyclists were gathering for the annual race, he caught the first plane in order to witness the mayhem of bicycles against 120-kph winds. The winner this past weekend was Max de Jong, who also won last year.

The Egyptian game called senet probably wasn't the first board game, but it's pretty old. It was first developed around 5,000 years ago, and became extremely popular. A view from the side, as in the image of Nefertiti above, makes it looks like chess, but senet was played more like backgammon, with a roll of the dice to determine how far you moved your pieces.

There is no evidence that senet was anything other than a form of entertainment at the time of its invention. But by about 4300 years ago, Egyptian tomb art began to depict the tomb’s dead inhabitant playing senet against living friends and relatives. Texts from the time suggest the game had begun to be seen as a conduit through which the dead could communicate with the living.

Over the next millennium, Egyptian texts came to describe the game as reflecting the movement of the soul through the Egyptian realm of the dead—called Duat—and toward the afterlife. And by about 3300 years ago, the game board itself had changed. In place of three simple vertical lines on square 28 of early senet boards, for example, some now had three hieroglyphic birds that Egyptians used to symbolize the soul. The board retained this symbolism for another 800 years, until the game fell out of fashion.

Read about the rise and fall of senet, and the changes in the game that showed its link to the afterlife, at Science magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: The Yorck Project)